Capacitating prospective teachers for nation building: contextual crisis

Education is the most important investment in the long haul and quality education impacts on nation building, people's capacity for adaption, value creation and innovation. The anchoring factor in successful education is the quality of the teacher. The essence of the teacher as a nation builder cannot be over-emphasized and the role of teacher education as a process of nation building is universally recognized. On the way towards the knowledge society the training of teachers in new ways is an important dimension to invest in. Investing in pre-service teacher training fulfils a strategic institutional need for a skilled cadre of professionals at training institutions, capable of supporting response to the education sector. The unprecedented expansion of private teacher education programmes and teacher training institutions leading to the deterioration of its quality have caused the pre-service teacher education to be blamed for incapacitating prospective teachers for nation building. This paper begins by highlighting the urgent need to improve the quality of teachers, especially pre-service teacher programmes. It identifies some important issues relating to pre-service teacher education which needs immediate answers and highlights some suggestions how the task can be enhanced for the newly visualized teacher education in India. For a robust teacher education programme, the guidelines of National Curriculum Framework 2005 (NCF 2005) and National Curriculum Framework for Teacher Education 2009 are to be implemented with much concern. The structural and pedagogic reform needs to invest on prospective teachers in order to enable them for acting as autonomous reflective groups of professionals who are sensitive to their social and national mandate and to the professional ethics and to the needs of heterogeneous groups of learners and perceptive to nation building. To conclude, teachers require new initiatives in their preparation to adequately galvanize their roles for nation building, that would need contextual based, responsive and dynamic pre-service teacher education programme based on national sociocultural diversities.